It was warm enough for Charlotte to lie out on the deck.
And beneath the stars she fell into a contented sleep.
Saint sat beside Patch, the sailboat gently swaying. He watched his daughter, and Saint watched him.
His hair light, his skin gold.
Saint did not ask how he had survived, how he had purchased the boat and stayed so hidden. She did not need to, as through the hatch she saw a fine bottle of cognac, and beside it, two heavy-bottomed crystal glasses.
“I think of you,” he said.
She smiled. “I thought you might have left the country.”
“I once made a promise to Charlotte that I would always be here for her.”
“It’s a risk.”
“And we both know I don’t take many of those.”
Saint laughed.
“I stay for you as well,” he said, meeting her eye.
She turned her head for a moment, took a breath. “We were lucky to catch you,” she said.
“I sail each day, return at sunset. I dream…each time I come in I dream of seeing you both waiting for me.”
“What do you do out there all day?”
“I paint.”
“You paint?”
He told her of Grace, of the letters she’d sent that sometimes ran to a hundred pages. She wrote of her childhood, her memories of her mother, the grand home they had shared, and the beautiful town she was named after. And of the missing girls, whose graves she planned to visit, whose memories she would share with their forgotten families. Grace told of how he had kept her alive with his paintings, his story, his strength to right their past, to find his passion. To love. Grace sent photographs of the white house, the barns demolished, and in each he saw not the size of the task at hand, but only the slow emergence of hope against the harshest of odds.
In her latest letter she told of how she had once lost her faith, had once prayed for nothing more than survival. But how, though theirs was a story now told, it was a story whose end had yet to be written.
For her part Saint told him of Charlotte. And of Theodore. And for an hour he sat and listened, and smiled and laughed, and wiped her tears.
And only when she was done did he take her hand and carefully lead her through the hatch, the ladder steep, the cabin it opened into simple.
Mostly bare and functional, except for the wall, where a single memory lay on canvas.
“I saved the best till last,” he said.
She stopped before the painting, the only one he had kept for himself. Though later, when it was time for them to leave, he would insist that she take it.
Saint knew the scene well.
Impossibly valuable, but to no one more than her.
Saint smiled as she looked at the two figures, lying beneath the stars, their heads side by side, their feet the north and south of a compass.
The thirteen-year-old pirate.
And the beekeeper that saved his life.